“The Remnant is the Whole”: Collage, Serial
Self-Representation, and Recovering Fragments
in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée
Nicole McDaniel
“We are in an era of the simultaneous, of juxtaposition, of the
near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the scattered. We exist
at a moment when the world is experiencing, I believe, something less like a great life line that would develop through time
than like a network that connects points and weaves its skein.”
Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces” (175)
“The decapitated forms. Worn. Marred, recording a past, of
previous forms. The present form face to face reveals the missing, the absent. Would-be-said remnant, memory. But the
remnant is the whole.”
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée (38)
Widely accepted as a self-referential text, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s
Dictée (1982) often confounds readers because of its heterogeneous and
collaged narrative, its alinear structure, and its resistance to the traditional generic forms of autobiography.1 Anne Cheng writes that, while
Dictée is often read as Cha’s autobiography, “it is hard to pinpoint what it
is exactly that makes this text an autobiography, since we are not offered
a name or a consistent narrating voice. If anything, this text exhibits a
great deal of resistance toward autobiography as a traditional genre where
an author might appear to be retrieving or chronicling her life” (140;
emphasis added). In a similar vein, Serena Fusco suggests that, “[i]f
Dictée is to be considered an autobiographical narrative … it is at some
conditions that definitely enlarge the traditional scope of that genre” as
it “straddles across autobiography and biography … play[ing] with the
conventions of both genres, blending these conventions with strategies
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coming from other genres, and moving beyond all of them” (180). The
generic classification of Dictée, along with many other contemporary life
writing texts, is both complicated and significant to the ways in which
the text gets read. Autobiography, Roy Pascal asserts in his foundational
work Design and Truth in Autobiography, “involves the reconstruction of
the movement of a life, or part of a life, in the actual circumstances in
which it was lived. Its centre of interest is the self, not the outside world,
though necessarily the outside world must appear so that … the personality finds its particular shape” (9).2 The strict focus on the self, often at
the expense of a larger cultural context, is crucial to the definition of a
traditional autobiography.
Moreover, as autobiography scholar Georges Gusdorf suggests, the
author of autobiography tries “to reassemble the scattered elements of
his individual life and to regroup them in a comprehensive sketch. The
historian of himself wishes to produce his own portrait, but while the
painter captures only a moment of external experience, the autobiographer strains toward a complete and coherent expression of his entire
destiny” (35; emphasis added). Gusdorf ’s emphasis on the entirety of
the autobiographer’s project is placed in contrast to Pascal’s position
that the autobiography can involve either the “movement of a life”
or, simply, of “part of a life.” And yet, both Pascal and Gusdorf stress
that the autobiographer moves toward a final moment: the present. If
the writer, as Gusdorf says, is an “historian of himself ” (35), then that
author will want to move his discussion of the self toward the present:
the point at which he is able to write the autobiography and pen his
final thoughts. Pascal asserts that the significance of autobiography is
“more the revelation of the present situation than the uncovering of the
past. If this present position is not brought home to us … there is a failure” (11). The “movement” in autobiography, then, must be toward the
present in order to illustrate the achievements of the autobiographer to
the reader and to discover, as Pascal writes, “the concrete reality of the
meaning of their life” (10). The definitions of autobiography posited by
Pascal and Gusdorf, among others, however, do not adequately describe
the self-referential texts written by many contemporary authors, including Cha’s Dictée.3 Dictée is alinear and achronological, multivocal and
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multilingual, heterogeneous and collaged, decontextualized and without a central narrating voice; it challenges the construction and theorization of conventional autobiographies and monolithic narratives at
every turn. Rather than read Cha’s text as an autobiography, I propose
that Dictée be read as a memoir which uses the heterogeneous technique of collage to emphasize the extent to which identity construction,
self-representation, and the recovery of memory fragments are interrelational and serial.
Memoir, as its mnemonic etymology suggests, is concerned with
uncovering the past instead of the “revelation of the present situation”
or with being the “historian of [one]self.” As Nancy K. Miller points
out, the etymology of “memoir” is foundational to an understanding
of the genre: “By its roots, memoir encompasses both acts of memory
and acts of recording—personal reminiscences and documentation.…
In this way, memoir is fashionably postmodern, since it hesitates to
define the boundaries between private and public, subject and object”
(2). Rather than moving toward a present self, movement in memoir
is often across the seemingly established and impermeable boundaries
between memory and history, time and place, or self and other, in search
of memories. “Although DICTEE is generally regarded as Cha’s autobiography,” writes Stella Oh, “it is not so much an autobiography, but a
compilation of multiple fragments of voices, images, and memories that
echoes the haunting beauty and horror of that which had been forgotten
and erased from the pages of formal records, traditional history, and familiar notions of identity and memory” (2). Not only does the genre of
memoir allow for the collage or assemblage of memories and fragments,
its flexibility supports recreation of stories and histories. Because many
memoirs are concerned almost exclusively with the past, memoirists
often reconstitute memories by blurring and shifting generic boundaries
as they approximate dialogue and recreate scenes from memory. Linda
Hutcheon points out that “the most important boundaries crossed [in
postmodern texts] have been those between fiction and non-fiction—
and by extension—between art and life” (“Beginning” 250),4 and
memoir is a genre that allows for and encourages permeability between
boundaries. Moreover, this permeability also allows for heterogeneous
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composition, enabling authors to more accurately represent memories
by including photographs, recipes, sheet music, maps, or other forms of
documentation.
Documentation is central to Dictée’s story and to its structure. As Cha
examines nationalism and citizenship in her narrative through formal
and official documents, she also incorporates many different types of
unusual self-imaging texts into her memoir, including photographs and
film stills, handwritten and typed letters, poetry, prose, political petitions, two pages of the memoir’s own handwritten manuscript, Chinese
characters, French translation exercises, charts, and geographic maps.
Collaged together, these texts provide the memoir with a heterogeneous
foundation, presenting the reader with a self-representational archive.
Memoir scholar Helen Buss asserts that “collage, expressed as a formal
choice in the episodic, genre-blending style of memoir, is a good word to
describe the aesthetic practice of women seeking […] a ‘self which could
include difference, connection, and heterogeneity’” (68), and Marjorie
Perloff points out that “[t]he basic structural principle [of collage] is that
of parataxis: anything can appear in the collage that is an attribute [of
the collaged] or refers to [her] in some way” (6–7). The ability to include
“anything” in a memoir with which to represent or illuminate the self
is significant to the genre’s inclusive boundaries and is foundational to
contemporary strategies for self-representation, particularly as it challenges the idea of a homogenous self-narrative.
In order to represent a heterogeneous self, one that is multilingual,
transnational, and mediated by images and documents, Cha deftly uses
the form of collage. Perloff explains in her essay, “The Invention of
Collage,” that artists and authors choose the form of collage for specific
reasons: “collagists […] assume [ ] that (1) expository linear discourse
cannot convey all the desired meaning, and (2) the transfer of words and
images from their original sources to the collage construction involves
new possibilities” (10). Cha’s decision to work in the expansive genre of
memoir, rather than the often restrictive form of traditional autobiography, illustrates her desire to present a version of self that works outside
established generic and textual boundaries. “She wanted,” Cha writes,
“to abolish it quickly, the formula, the ritual. All too quickly the form
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and the skin that resembles a past. Any past” (140). Instead of composing a text that follows the formula, that looks like a past assembled in
a “comprehensive sketch” of the autobiographer’s life, Cha assembles a
collage which examines the past without resembling the traditional, selfreferential texts with which she and her readers are familiar. By challenging the established forms, she challenges the idea that narratives must
be told in a linear, chronological fashion, and critiques the possibility of
representing a complete life, choosing instead to represent an episodic,
serialized version of self.
As a way to structure this episodic self, Cha arranges her memoir using
the nine muses first individualized by Hesiod in the Theogony as the
daughters of Mnemosyne—the goddess of memory—as a foundation.
Each section in Dictée corresponds with one of the nine Greek Muses
and the art she traditionally represents: “Clio: History,” “Calliope: Epic
Poetry,” “Urania: Astronomy,” “Melpomene: Tragedy,” “Erato: Love
Poetry,” “Elitere: Lyric Poetry,” “Thalia: Comedy,” “Terpsichore: Choral
Dance,” and “Polymnia: Sacred Poetry.” Structuring the text this way,
Cha immediately positions herself in a tradition of women in the arts
and learning. Of the nine muses, one is altered by Cha: the Greek Muse
“Euterpe” is omitted, and Cha’s refashioned muse, “Elitere,” takes her
place. This is a significant alteration because the etymology of “Euterpe”
means “to please,” and this memoir does not attempt to please its readers
through simplification. Instead, Cha constantly challenges her readers
to rethink assumptions about gender, nation, language, and self-representation. As Pablo Picasso wrote, the purpose of collage is to make
audiences think about things in a new way: “Th[e] displaced object [in
collage] has entered a universe for which it was not made and where it
retains, in a measure, its strangeness. And this strangeness was what we
wanted to make people think about because we were quite aware that
our world was becoming very strange and not exactly reassuring” (qtd.
in Perloff 5). Cha is dedicated to foregrounding the “strangeness” and
un-reassuring postcolonial, transnational, and multilingual contexts in
which she lives and about which she writes. Thus instead of “Euterpe,”
the muse traditionally associated with music, Cha includes a section
titled “Elitere: Lyric Poetry.”
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Both parts of this segment’s title, the word “elitere” and lyric poetry,
are significant to this memoir’s construction. “Elitere” is an invention
of Cha’s, so the etymology must be speculated upon. It seems, however, that the “litere” must be etymologically related to littera, or “letter.”
Shelley Sunn Wong suggests that “Elitere” is a play on “elite and literare,” and that it “emerges to critique the privileged place of epic as
high literature” (51; emphasis original), while Stella Oh remarks that
“Elitere” “call[s] attention to her own literary power to record the missing memories through her lyrical prose poetry” (3). Clearly, Cha challenges the ways in which her audience perceives and understands the
distinction between letters and images. As evidenced by the inclusion of
Chinese and Korean ideograms, and the incorporation of handwritten
pages from Dictée’s own manuscript and handwritten correspondence,
all of which are texts that are simultaneously letters and images, the
boundaries between what constitutes a letter and what makes an image
are blurred.
The association of “Elitere” with lyric poetry, moreover, underscores
the significance of locating a self with unfixed boundaries, as the need
for a self-imaging lyric poet persists in contemporary society. According
to Helen Buss, this lyric self-referential voice “re-emerge[s] in the memoirs of women who find the same need as the earlier lyric poets. They too
had to relocate their personal identity in terms of a world in which their
old self-definitions had been swept away and new identities demanded
a search through past and present realities” (15). Rather than simply
recalling events from the past or transcribing historical events, Buss
continues, these contemporary memoirists attempt to retrieve objects
from the past with “a voice that speaks neither from complete present
involvement in the event nor from complete objective removal from
the event” (15). Through her own reworking of the Hesiodic tradition,
then, Cha aligns herself with the lyric poets who attempted to redefine
definitions and representations of self through their relationship with
the past. This new way to understand the self ’s connection to both the
past and the present also highlights Cha’s decision to use the Muses as an
explicit structure for her memoir. The Muses were believed to be “divine
and remote, creat[ors] [of ] the narrative” (MacCurtain 255), while the
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narrator was simply their vessel. In Dictée, however, Cha foregrounds
her own authorial and narratorial presence through the heterogeneity
of collage, by challenging the traditional formula of autobiography, and
with the powerful voices included throughout the narrative. Indeed,
to further emphasize the significance of the authorial prerogative, Cha
links each section, while titled with the name of a muse, to other female
figures. There is no doubt that Cha is in charge of the narrative and
that, by connecting the muses with other women, both she and they are
rendered less “remote.”
Revisioning Hesiod’s Theogony is significant to Dictée, as many scholars have suggested. In an essay comparing the texts of Hesiod and Cha,
Kun Jong Lee points out that, while Cha invokes the Muses twice in
her narrative, her “imitation of Hesiod is rather off the beat,” as she
“deletes ‘Muse,’ ‘Goddess,’ and ‘daughter of Zeus’ in her second invocation” (78). Further, Lee asserts, while studies of the intertextuality
between Theogony and Dictée center on Cha’s “subversive rewriting” of
Hesiod, Cha presents her readers with a different kind of collection of
women than Hesiod. While “the women in the Hesiodic Catalogue of
Women are remembered and celebrated precisely because they are bearers of divine seed and mothers of heroic sons” (Lee 79), the women
discussed in Dictée are themselves revolutionaries, like Joan of Arc or
Yu Guan Soon, or support matrilinearity, as is the case with the frequent allusions to Cha’s own mother. Further, these female figures come
from transnational contexts and are presented as women who “reject the
roles prescribed by patriarchy and ultimately transcend the limitations
of their short lives by asserting their voices and/or through female bonding” (Lee 80). Lee and other scholars point out many significant ways
that Cha reworks and revisions Hesiod,5 yet absent from their analyses
are any discussions about how the “catalogue of women” presented in
Dictée relates to Cha’s own serial self-representation therein.
Rather than read the many female personages included in Dictée as
simply, as Lee suggests, “a gallery of the portraits of women,” I read the
depictions of these women as reflections and refractions of Cha’s own
self-representation. While Cha looks to other women for inspiration
and understanding, evidenced by the fact that she frames the chapters
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in her text with the brief biographies of different women, both family
members and historic figures, in creating her collaged memoir she also
finds these women central to her own construction and comprehension
of self. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson suggest in their introduction to
Interfaces that
Women’s artistic production of the autobiographical occurs
frequently at the interface of the domains of visuality (image)
and textuality (the aural and written word, the extended narrative, the dramatic script). In these heterogeneous self-displays,
textuality implicates visuality as, in different ways, the visual
image engages components of textuality at material, voiced,
and/or virtual sites. Thus it is essential to expand the concept
of visual autobiography as self-portraiture to include visual,
textual, voiced, and material modes of embodied self-representation. These self-referential displays at the visual/textual interface in hybrid or pastiche modes materialize self-inquiry and
self-knowledge, not through a mirror for seeing and reproducing the artist’s face and torso but as the artists’ engagement with
the history of seeing women’s bodies. (7)
The production of Dictée as memoir happens at the interface of visuality and textuality, and it is through the presentation of other women
that the artist’s own self-representation takes place. Sue-Im Lee writes
that the “non-identity of Dictée’s subject is first and foremost founded
on the fact that she has no textual body within the nine chapter-like
segments that constitute the text. There is no linguistic representation
of the subject as a corporeal identity” (243), yet the reader has multiple
impressions of the narrator through the stories and histories she presents
as part of her own self-representational project.
While Lee suggests that the narrator is not corporally present within
the memoir, she is outlined throughout the text. As Cha herself writes,
“Her portrait is not represented in a still photograph, nor in a painting. All along, you see her without actually seeing, actually having seen
her. You do not see her yet. For the moment, you only see her traces”
(100). Rather than give readers the/a corporeal self, Cha reflects her76
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self textually; as she points out, the narrator’s self-image is not given
as a visual text—neither in a photograph nor in a painting—yet she
has represented herself “all along.” “She allows others,” Cha writes on
the first page of the memoir, “In place of her. Admits others to make
full” (3). Literally and formally incorporating the stories and bodies of
other women, Cha avoids giving readers a mirrored image of herself, yet
she sees and presents herself in an interrelational fashion through those
other bodies and histories. Relationality is significant, argues Buss, because women’s memoirs often “proceed in a series of incremental scenes
of realization that always involve relationships with significant others as
well as efforts to achieve autonomy. Such memoirs often end not with
resolution, but with a condition of continuing renegotiation with whatever material conditions and actual persons represent community for
the memoirist” (13). Rather than present readers with a “non-identity,”
the character of the narrator is transmitted through the stories of others
that represent community for Cha as she examines and critiques the
ways in which identities are constructed, translated, and textualized.
In Dictée, readers are given sketches, information, photographs, and/or
histories of figures like Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Hyung Soon [Huo]
Cha, Saint Theresa of Lisieux, and a diseuse. Each section, and each story
within that section, reflects back to the reader information about the way
Cha characterizes herself and how she understands lineage. Presenting
her readers with a horizontal, serial version of kinship, Cha writes
From A Far
what nationality
or what kindred and relation
what blood relation
what blood ties of blood
what ancestry
what race generation
what house clan tribe stock strain
what lineage extraction
what breed sect gender denomination caste
what stray ejection misplaced
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Tertium Quid neither one thing nor the other
Tombe des nues de naturalized
what transplant to dispel on (20)
Delineating different ways that people are and have been labeled, categorized, and thus subjugated, this poem presents ideas of generations
and ancestry in a manner that folds back on itself, underscoring the
cyclical and refracted way she has chosen to represent her ‘self.’ In a
traditional, vertical assessment of lineage: “blood relation” is synonymous with “ancestry,” which is synonymous with “generation” as well
as “house clan tribe stock strain.” Moreover, the refusal to punctuate or
otherwise textually demarcate these words from one another emphasizes their interchangeability. This poem is placed within the text on one
page; it faces another, shorter poem:
IN NOMINE
LE NOM
NOMINE (21)
Visually, these two texts challenge each other; one represents a serial,
recursive, horizontal understanding of ancestry while the other emphasizes the significance and power of naming, and of keeping the name.
Significant in discussions of images and graphic narratives, the placement of these two texts on opposing page forces the reader to understand them both together and in conflict with each other. In his critical
examination of form in comic books and graphic novels, Will Eisner
emphasizes the importance of the total page in analyzing frames, and
readers must either read these two pages together—and try to reconcile
them in some way—or physically turn the page (41).
Dictée’s cyclical, polyvocal, and serial movement emphasizes the recollection and (re)collection of memories and images that are both personal
and cultural; the “Clio: History” section gives a brief biography of Yu
Guan Soon, a Korean revolutionary, along with the narrator’s thoughts
about history. “There is no people without a nation,” Cha writes, “no
people without ancestry” (28). To emphasize ancestry and the people
through whom history is understood, Cha provides readers with a ver78
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sion of Japan’s colonization of Korea through the lens of Yu Guan Soon’s
biography; she inscribes her memories of the ancestral country on the
cultural myth of a female revolutionary. Cha emphasizes the significance
of recording history, as she explains the difficulty of witnessing: “To
other nations who are not witnesses, who are not subject to the same
oppressions, they cannot know. Unfathomable the words, the terminology: enemy, atrocities, conquest, betrayal, invasion, destruction. They
exist only in the larger perception of History’s recording” (32). Those
unfathomable words and decontextualized images represent memories,
collected in Dictée as a significant and forceful counternarrative to the
kinds of records “History” keeps. This memoir is committed to documenting and recording Cha’s particular history, and thus, by extension,
a specific cultural memory that does not aim to be representative on a
larger scale. Representing the self through the bodies and stories of other
women, emphasizing the interrelational ways in which she understands
herself and history, she is able to provide an archive of memories that
presents the unfathomable.
Her interrelational understanding of history also surfaces in
“Melpomene: Tragedy,” in a letter to her mother. Remembering the
story of her mother’s exile from her homeland when South Korea was
under Japan’s rule, Cha writes, “You carried not a single piece, not a
photograph, nothing to evoke your memory” (81). The use of second
person, here in the guise of a letter, serves to distance the reader even
farther from the narrative, as “you” implicates the reader in an unfamiliar and extremely personal historical moment. Indeed, Cha uses the
second person frequently in Dictée, often without the frame of the letter
and without presenting readers with a clear addressee, emphasizing her
memoir’s heterogeneous and fragmented structure and challenging the
ability of any text to claim representative status. Further, this quotation centers on Cha’s mother’s lack of archival documents, contrasting
sharply with Dictée’s commitment to presenting the collaged memories
of its author. Cha unveils how important documents and images are in a
contemporary, transcultural and international context; questions about
what documents a person has in their possession, how those documents
are read by both individuals and by officials, and whether or not those
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documents are passed down through ancestors are all exposed in this
memoir. Ultimately, as she exposes both the importance and insignificance of “objects” in constructing a life narrative, it is through the stories of the other women that readers learn the most about the narrator.
Reflecting and refracting Cha’s memories through the stories, histories,
and biographies of other women foregrounds the multiplicity and seriality of identity.
Like many contemporary memoirists who also struggle with structuring fragments of memory and history in order to represent the self, Cha
relies on seriality and serial self-representation to illustrate the insufficiency of one image or text to represent a life narrative. The idea of
seriality is not new, particularly as it has been documented in fiction
and visual media, but seriality in memoir and other forms of self-representation is undertheorized. The concept of seriality itself is in transition; no longer strictly associated with sequelization (as in the serial and
sequential publication of the Victorian novel, for example), seriality is
closely linked with repetition and recursivity.6 Seriality can be either
recursive and episodic or sequential and chronological. In Dictée, seriality is emphasized by Cha’s self-representational strategies of refraction
and reflection, and in the frequent loss and recovery of fragments—
fragments of memory, of identity, of history—within the narrative.
Memories, Cha writes, are not stuck in a particular time: “It is burned
into your over-present memory. Memory-less. Because it is not in the
past. It cannot be. Not in the least of all pasts” (45). Memory, Cha asserts, is serial and multiple, and the form of her self-representational
text must follow suit. Smith and Watson suggest that “[t]emporal succession may also create a serial relationship in which multiple instances
of self-referencing unfold as a process” (34). Moreover, they continue,
the subject of serial self-representation is “[a]t once discrete and multiple” as the subject “stages life narrative as sequence with unpredictable variation. The serialized personal narrative thus enacts a larger story
about women’s relationship to historical representations of woman and
gendered sexuality” (“Introduction” 35). Each of the nine chapters in
Dictée presents a different narrative mediated through a different cultural or historical perspective, and thus each section represents a differ80
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ent moment in the serial self-representation of the narrator. What some
scholars have pointed to as “non-sequiturs” or “unreadable” movements
in her memoir, I propose are Cha’s way to present serial accounts of the
self. Using images and texts in a discordant and alinear fashion, she illustrates the act of construction inherent in identity creation—whether
gendered, national, linguistic, or cultural. Serially representing her self,
Cha underscores the significance of fragments and remnants in identity
construction. Choosing the genre of memoir, and incorporating heterogenic elements in a collage, Cha sutures personal, historical, aural, and
mediated fragments in order to present her likeness in the written and
visual form of a book.
As readers, however, Anne Cheng points out, “[o]ur compositional
desires are constantly evoked, exposed, and thwarted. Thus the deployment of photographs and other fragments in the text precludes imaginary
identification and obscures collective memories” (150). The thwarted
desires of the reader are significant because, as Wong says in the first line
of her essay, “Dictée is not a representative work” (43). Often, readers of
an autobiographical text will feel as if they “know” the author/narrator,
and will identify too closely with that character, or they may assume
that one narrative can stand in for all other narratives and, as many
scholars have pointed out, this conflation happens more often for autobiographical texts written by marginalized individuals.7 Cha’s memoir is
constructed specifically against this tendency to conflate the author with
her text and the tendency for readers to subsume memoirs under the
category of “representative” works. “In order to faithfully represent the
disparate tensions and the interplay between them,” Jennifer GuranoTrier suggests, “Cha does not attempt to create one cohesive narrative of
Korean history or of Korean American identity, but instead presents the
pieces, the fragments, in their ruptured and discordant state” (254). This
is not a memoir of a collective experience, no matter how many different
narratives Cha includes, nor does it attempt to reconcile the fragments
with one another in a cohesive, linear text. As Cha writes, “Would-besaid remnant, memory. But the remnant is the whole. The memory is the
entire” (38). There are no final words in this memoir, nor, in Gusdorf ’s
words, is there any “comprehensive sketch” of the author/narrator.
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The collaged, heterogenic structure does not allow for the reader’s
compositional desires, or, as Sue-Im Lee writes, the “realist readerly orientation is missing” (244). Cha goes as far as to historically decontextualize the images and texts incorporated within the narrative as much
as possible, ensuring that “the remnant is the whole.” Instead, Cha integrates her reader into the text through the powerful individualized
voices of the collection of women, including herself that she provides,
with an overt and clear structure provided by the Muses, and by choosing some photographs and illustrations that readers may be able to identify. The photograph of Maria Falconetti, from the 1928 film La Passion
de Jeanne d’Arc and included in the “Erato: Love Poetry” chapter, for
example, may be a recognizable image for many Western readers. Those
familiar with that particular film still, however, may not be familiar with
other images or experiences presented in this memoir, thereby giving
different audience members varying perspectives on the text. This decontextualization reaffirms the narrative as Cha’s own self-representational memoir because, when assembled, the images presented serve to
represent herself and only her self. “The collage,” writes Aleida Assmann,
“breaks the homogeneous surface of the canvas, rendering it jagged and
uneven” (77); through this memoir the surface of “identity” is revealed
to be discordant and fragmented.
The form of collage is also important because the images are not labeled, titled, or footnoted. Removing the images from any context outside this memoir emphasizes its metatextuality and, as Picasso pointed
out, makes the collaged “objects” even more “displaced.” Indeed, it can
be difficult to know what the image represents outside the context of
the memoir, or from which contexts Cha takes the images. “To Cha,”
Cheng asserts, “the photograph can often offer a visual and facile mask
of identification and sympathy. By refusing a unidirectional correspondence between the image and the referent it supposedly guards, Cha resists photography’s easy promise to furnish evidence and to animate
the desire to collect data” (144). While, as Cheng suggests, Cha resists
contextualizing the photos and film stills included in the memoir, she
also refuses to narrate the maps, graphs, calligraphied characters, and
other atypical self-referential, nonverbal “objects” incorporated into the
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narrative. Without the historical and cultural contexts with which to
approach the images and texts presented in Dictée, Cha engages in a
radical otherness that places the reader in a position of never being able
to completely identify with this narrative. Even so, readers can engage
with the recovery of cultural and personal fragments and memories Cha
presents and archives in Dictée.
One of the most powerful images comes at the end of the “Elitere:
Lyric Poetry” section. The final page of that chapter is a cave painting
of a woman’s hand; the thin white hand contrasts with the darker rock
of the cave wall. The textures of the rock are easily discernable through
the painted hand, creating a powerful suggestion of the continuity and
fortitude of the natural world in contrast with other kinds of texts and
objects, like those included as proof of citizenship or other highly valued
transnational documents provided in Dictée. This image is further significant because of its placement at the end of the “Elitere” chapter, for
while Cha’s hands have created and assembled the text, this section of
the memoir is comprised solely of her poetry. It does not include letters or political documents; rather, “Elitere” seeks to be a testament to
the skill with which Cha arranges and presents words. Indeed, many of
her poems speak as much to the creation of this memoir and the way
memory works as they do to any other subject:
Within those limits,
resurrect, as much as
possible, possibly could hold
possibly ever hold
a segment of it
segment by segment
segmented
sequence, narrative, variation
on make believe. (129)
Here, the art of constructing a text in which “as much as possible” is
contained, in which memory is collected and re-collected, in which the
book—her narrative physically contained “Within those limits”—contains all it could “possibly ever hold,” is given poetic representation.
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The fact that this poem comes in the chapter of the non-traditional
muse, Cha’s revision of Hesiod, is indicative of her investment in creation and memory. By repeating the words “possible” and “segment” in
this section of the poem, Cha underscores the importance of assembling
fragments and remnants in order to present a narrative of the self as she
simultaneously nods to the difficulty in characterizing and representing
that self.
Cha writes: “To extract each fragment by each fragment from the
word from the image another word another image the reply that will not
repeat history in oblivion” (33). The seriality in reconstructing memories, she suggests, in extracting the fragmented texts and images, contests both the traditional records of “History” and the conventional ways
to represent the self. Inherent in a serial and interrelational strategy of
self-construction is the desire to expose the significance of others on our
own self-imaging. Recovering and (re)collecting the stories and embodied histories of others allows their stories to continue; while the simple
collection and repetition of their stories and bodies does nothing to alter
conventional notions about women and identity, seeing the self through
the bodies of others allows their stories to continue beyond their physical existence. This continuation beyond death is a driving force behind
seriality and serial self-representation, as objects that are lost may also be
found. Leigh Gilmore asserts that “the limit implied by seriality represents an engagement with the ultimate limit of life and death” (97), and
Dictée exists in that liminal space between life and death as Cha’s own
self-representation is figured through characters who no longer exist,
and the construction of her text emphasizes the ways in which objects
and stories last beyond their embodied owners. The form of collage itself
emphasizes the presentation, collection, and persistence of texts, and the
self-representational archive Cha presents to her readers is a testament to
recovering those fragments of memory.
Notes
1 A few examples: Fusco writes, “Something like embarrassment grips us, when it
comes to the generic definition of Cha’s text. Such ‘embarrassment’ is perfectly
understandable: confronted with such a challenging blend of genres, both liter84
“ T h e R e m n a n t i s t h e W h o l e”
ary and nonliterary, it is somehow difficult to refer to Dictée as anything else
than Dictée itself ” (176); Kang suggests that “[t]he temporal gap between the
initial 1982 publication and the current critical interest in the book could be attributed partially to […] the fragmented and elliptical quality of the book” (34);
Cheng mentions its “narrative opacity” (142) while Lee writes of its “aesthetic of
fragmentation and non-cohesiveness” (246), its “deliberate aesthetic of disorder”
and its “incoherent voice” (247); Frost points to Dictée’s pages, “crowded with
such instances of language that impedes signification, images whose figural content belies their hermeticism. Such impasses reveal the degree to which image
and text in Dictée function as unreadable signifiers” (182).
2 Adams begins his book with a chapter titled “Design and Lie in Modern
American Autobiography,” by writing “The modern era in autobiographical theory began in 1960 with the publication of Roy Pascal’s now classic Design and
Truth in Autobiography. Since then, virtually all autobiographical theorists have
arranged their arguments within a complex, interconnected spectrum based on
the terms in Pascal’s title. Design has been treated under such headings as genre,
form, mode, and style; truth has been handled in a bewildering variety of ways,
including its relation to fiction, nonfiction, fact, fraud, figure, memory, identity,
error, and myth. The word autobiography has frequently been analyzed in terms
of its three separate components: autos or self, bios or life, and graphe or writing”
(1). Gilmore calls Pascal’s text a “critical precursor to the renewed interest in
autobiography studies” (“Mark” 16).
3 Smith and Watson present a comprehensive discussion of autobiographies and
autobiography studies. Chapter Five, “A History of Autobiography Criticism
Part 1: Defining the Genre,” is particularly relevant to this discussion as they
place Pascal and Gusdorf, among others, in the “second wave” of autobiographical criticism. The second wave, they argue, “opened up the discussion of autobiographical narrating by insisting on its status as an act of creation rather than
mere transcription of the past,” but “an ideology of the autonomous selfhood
of autobiography underlies much of the theorizing in this second wave and informs the texts privileged and the practices of self-creation valued” (128). In the
contemporary, “third wave” of autobiographical scholarship, as is the case with
genre studies more generally, postmodern understandings of narrative and of
the self have complicated the way self-representational narratives are read and
understood. Criticism, however, frequently returns to these second-wave discussions of autobiography for definition and boundaries.
4 The tendency to dissolve established generic boundaries leads many critics to assert that postmodernism and genre studies are mutually exclusive, but the ways
in which postmodern texts play with or distort traditional generic boundaries
paradoxically support a need for those boundaries. As Cohen argues: “though
[the assumption that genre theory must underplay literary artifice, be coherent,
and linear] may apply to some generic theories, there are others that are per-
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fectly compatible with multiple discourses, with narratives of discontinuity, with
transgressed boundaries” (11). Highly flexible, memoir allows for and encourages multiple discourses and transgressed boundaries, as it is able to incorporate
many different kinds of self-representation.
5 See Oh and Wong.
6 There is an important difference between “serial” and “sequel.” According to
Budra and Schellenberg, the sequel is always aligned with the word “sequence,”
from the Latin root sequi, meaning “to follow.” The sequel is linked with temporality in a way that the series may not be. Also fundamental to a definition of
sequel is “a precursor narrative that was originally presented as closed and complete in itself (whether or not it was, in fact, conceived as such by its authors)”
(7). There is, Budra and Schellenberg assert, a “requirement of internal sequentiality” so that the “story continues, and the story remains the same” (8, 9).
7 See, for example, Kingston’s essay “Cultural Mis-readings by American
Reviewers.”
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